Author: Fred Blahnik

To my loyal readers:  You are hereby welcome and encouraged to share in (reputed) Confucian insights on my new blog site entitled “Did Confucius Really Say That???”  Please share the blog site address with your family members, friends, and associates if you find that you enjoy and carry away bushels of previously unknown “wisdom” from this new literary enterprise of mine.  Thank you for your past patronage.  Fred Blahnik

• …..he struggled out of bed in the morning with exaggerated effort. He had barely slept two winks the night prior, his left shoulder was killing him, overall he felt like shit half-rewarmed only it’s impossible to conceive shit could ever have felt so depressed and despondent, and he was then left wondering what to do?  Yes, what course of action can and should one pursue when feeling so ungodly miserable at such an infantile hour?  And, after but a few seconds of intense contemplation, he realized there was only a single thing he could do in that dolorous situation:  He thusly went and sought out his favorite recliner and carefully contorted his body into a delicate position where—Can you believe this?!—his left shoulder and biceps didn’t actually ache like the Second Coming of Lucifer.  Thereafter, in not too great a length of time, he drifted off into a somewhat fitful sleep–wholly unlike the night previous–intent on waking up from this small slumbering respite marginally recharged from a physical standpoint, in better spirits (Realistically, they couldn’t have been any worse!), and ready–No, eager!–to face the still basically new day sitting before him like a luscious ripe plum…..

The present distorts the past, or at least past memories. It’s like being stuck in that house of mirrors down at the county fair carnival, where in every direction you turn you immediately notice that your body shape has been grotesquely and unflatteringly distorted by some arcane law of refractory physics.  Such is the case with memories as well; they too become ridiculously distorted while looking back through the devious prism of time.  And typically in a favorable manner; have you ever noticed that??  Very seldom unfavorably.  Very seldom unflattering.  Isn’t this fact interesting–the fact that overall favorability of a memory increases in a direct relationship to the number of years we travel backward in time?  And why should this be the case?  Why does the past shine with a luster that it never came close to possessing at the time something happened?  Well…..because we subliminally wish for this to happen.  We desperately rely on the highly malleable and compliant past to be our security blanket relative to the harsh present and–even more portentous–the perilous unknown future, and thus it automatically succumbs to this persistent desire of ours.  The past everlastingly looks more attractive simply because we wish that to be the case.

The battle for creativity boils down in the end to a race with one’s own brain. It is no secret anymore—or at the bare minimum it shouldn’t be a secret at least—that one’s brain becomes more and more sclerotic with age and less and less plastic. Roughly translated, this simply means that we lose the impetus and means for sublime creativity as we grow older.  No one escapes this cruel phenomenon either.  Not Albert Einstein, who did his most stellar work in his twenties, and then in the latter years of his life was little more than a doddering, eccentric shell of a scientist who spent the bulk of his time involuntarily resting on well-deserved laurels while doing nothing of importance professionally apart from regurgitating his ground-breaking theories from decades earlier.  Not Earnest Hemingway, who is said to have developed such a massive writer’s’ block in his sixties when his inspirational well dried up completely that he became so frustrated he tragically saw fit to take his own life.  Not James Watson, the illustrious American biologist who was the undisputed catalyst in unmasking the structure to the long-secret DNA molecule in 1953 at the ripe “old” age of twenty six years.  Following this ground-breaking discovery, Watson–who is still very much alive at ninety years of age and has spent the remainder of his career determinedly pursuing other biological Holy Grails–has never come remotely close to replicating that astounding Eureka moment from his mid-twenties. The (sad) lesson to be learned from all this?   Your best creative work comes before the age of forty, oftentimes even thirty.  So if you haven’t unlocked the clandestine virtuoso hiding inside you before those temporal benchmarks come around, it almost certainly ain’t gonna happen at all!

Distilled down to its barest essence, intelligence can best be described with this inordinately simple algorithm: Smart people think before they speak, while stupid people speak before they think.  That’s it!  That’s all there is to it!  That, Reader, is the true, unabridged definition of intelligence.  The highly conceptualized and theorized idea of intelligence contentiously debated by multi-degreed psychologists and neurologists is really no more complicated than this shockingly elementary truism.  Smart people seldom, if ever, get themselves into trouble with their mouths, while stupid people unfailingly do; they just can’t seem to help themselves!  Diarrhea of the vocal cords is the canary-in-the-coalmine predictor and single hallmark which unfailingly defines a dearth of basic intelligence.

Now

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

Now is here

And tomorrow is a million dreams away

I’m not going to squander this moment by overplanning and worrying about those million dreams

They are only dreams, after all, only illusions……

While the moment—now—is as real as it gets

Perchance outstanding good luck and good fortune, I will indeed someday reach those million dreams, those million illusions, those million mirages in life’s expansive desert

But that is not my biggest concern right now as I sit here typing on my laptop

Because the moment at hand is all that really matters, now and at any undefined point in the future as well

We can talk all we want about the future

And what we hope to do in it, aim to do in it, intend to do in it, plan to do in it……

But those plans can all be wiped out with one internal combustion engine gone dreadfully awry, one random pull of a trigger, one clumsy misstep under hazardous circumstances, or one rogue, malicious embolus breaking free and thereupon deciding to circulate within the most critical arteries of our bodies

Don’t go there…..

Don’t take that risk…..

Now is here

And tomorrow is a million dreams away

Tomorrow will ALWAYS be a million dreams away

In deference to this reality, embrace the present

Embrace it like there is no tomorrow

Like there is no tomorrow

Like today is the final day of your life

Because it may well be

Because for all we know and are capable of knowing, there will BE no tomorrow

Tomorrow is no more certain and concrete than one beat of a cartoonishly fragile heart.

No more certain and concrete than one small breath into hyper-delicate, cartoonishly thin lungs.

No more certain and concrete than one shiv jammed unmercifully into a cartoonishly blood-engorged liver.

No more certain and concrete than one freakish blood pressure eruption within the most Lilliputian vascular vessels of a cartoonishly dainty brain.

No more certain than ghostly fog rolling in overnight.

No more certain than a benevolent Supreme Being.

But now is here

And here is all I truly need

Here and now is all anybody truly needs.

• ALL KNOWLEDGE IS GOOD KNOWLEDGE!!!!! Ignorance may be bliss, but–Truthfully!!!–would you rather be informed or blissful?  Knowledge, even knowledge of the distasteful variety, is a potent weapon in the hands of an intelligent person, and when squared up against a worthy opponent we surely need all the weapons that we can muster.  So don’t mimic an ostrich and shy away from receiving news, even if you expect it to be of the negative variety.  You may not be able to avoid the immediate pain in concert with any accompanying detritus, granted, but in the long run this new knowledge could very well prove to be invaluable and serve as an informed launching pad for ensuing action.

Forget everything that precedes the word “but” in a conversation or written essay. It’s what comes after that pivotal literary bridge which REALLY matters in the eyes of the speaker or writer.  Whatever sugarcoated tripe comes beforehand is merely a literary buffer meant to soothe the feelings of the recipient; just tune that polite-but-pointless bullshit out completely and focus instead on the information delivered after the key word “but”, inasmuch as that corresponds with the honest message the deliverer is clumsily striving to impart.

I heard an investment guru pontificating on the radio the other day about the advantages of blindly saving money for the future–for the LONG RANGE future…..deep into that quagmire otherwise known as old age–and I found myself asking the seminal question:  SAVE FOR WHAT?!?!  So that you have a ton of cash stashed away when you turn ninety years of age and can henceforth hand it over to the federal government or to greedy heirs after you pass away?!  So that you can crow about your net worth even as an ambulance takes you, with its sirens wailing and its engine revving into red R.P.M. numbers, to the hospital for the last time?!  So that you have a shitload of money at your disposal just when you are least able to enjoy it to the maximum?!  Who in their right mind can possibly argue that one’s quality of life is even remotely equal at eighty years of age when you are broken down and senile and impotent to when one is thirty years old and vibrant and virile and drowning in youthful hormones??  Quality of life matters far more than quantity of life, and using this unalterable fact as your mantra, do not be afraid to—in fact, DO!!!!!—spend the sensible majority of your hard-earned money at a relatively young age when passions reign supreme, the world is your plaything, and the quality of your life is at its very pinnacle.

• …..y’know, I wasn’t one bit happy with what happened to me last night but, on the other hand, I can very readily envision a million other worse things which might have transpired but didn’t.  And that thought offers me some much-needed peace of mind and a soothing poultice for my tormented soul.  Yeah, I fucked up royally and made a bad decision, and it undoubtedly won’t be the last time in my life I do that either.  But when I step back to clear my head, rationally assess the situation, and consider perspective—Yes, especially consider perspective!!!—what happened to me last evening was just small potatoes when compared to bigger, more transcendent features of my existence here on this tiny blue planet.  And thus I can take mucho solace in that thought:  What actually happened versus worse things that could have happened, and I’m talking about arrantly realistic possibilities here too, not esoterically unrealistic calamities like a rogue asteroid striking Earth or having my home sucked into a giant, previously unidentified sinkhole or being trampled to death by Sasquatch during a carefree hike in the mountains of central Washington.  I am thoroughly dismayed and not at all happy right now—I can and will frankly admit that much—but I also know I could quite easily be a whole lot more sad for a nearly infinite number of valid reasons…..